


just hanging around (then he fell in love)

by thesoftsoobin



Category: TOMORROW X TOGETHER | TXT (Korea Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Choi Soobin Is Bad At Feelings, Choi Soobin-Centric, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining Choi Yeonjun, Pre-debut, Shy Choi Soobin, Soobin wants to be the best leader, Whipped Choi Yeonjun, Wooyoung and Yeosang appear sometimes, Yeonjun wants to be the best boyfriend
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24617272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesoftsoobin/pseuds/thesoftsoobin
Summary: soobin was already struggling to make it to debut in one piece,and then yeonjun kissed him.
Relationships: Choi Soobin/Choi Yeonjun
Comments: 11
Kudos: 136





	just hanging around (then he fell in love)

**Author's Note:**

> I've been buzzing about writing this for months now, and I finally feel happy enough with this chapter to post yayyyy! I'm still pretty nervous though. It's my first yeonbin AU and my first ever "canon-verse" AU.
> 
> I did my best to do some research on TXT's timeline and trainee/pre-debut life, but I still don't know everything and there's probably some inaccuracies. 
> 
> Also, just wanna make it clear I don't feel the same way about Soobin as he does about himself in this I want to make that VERY clear. I think he's the best leader, super talented, and deserves to be at BigHit 100%!! HE'S MY BABY.
> 
> Okay, carry on and enjoy :)

[NOW]

It’s happening too fast.

_Crown_ is too uptempo, and Soobin keeps tripping over his feet despite memorizing the choreography weeks ago. "Weeks ago," apparently, though it feels more like days. Their debut is less than four months away, and that will pass even quicker. 

There was once a time when it felt like these days would never come. Now they’re all rushing by so quickly he feels like he can’t even catch his breath sometimes.

Like now, while he pushes open the door to the practice room and drags his feet down to the water dispenser. His water bottle is empty and his chest is tight. He would give anything to collapse on his bed and watch the minutes tick by a little slower on the clock.

As he uncaps his water bottle, the practice room door swooshes open and clicks closed again behind him. Soobin takes a deep breath, an attempt to get his heart to stop racing before whoever it is can suggest they take a break they don’t have time for. 

But then he turns around and there’s Yeonjun, and for some reason, the sight of him never helps to still his heart.

"Oh, hey hyung," he says, turning back to fill his water bottle and shake whatever reason that is from his head.

Yeonjun claps a hand on his shoulder and shakes him with a teasing enthusiasm. "Good job on that last run-through, Soobin-ah," he says. "You stumbled off me and Beomie's backs a little less this time."

"I stepped on the back of Taehyun's shoe and he tripped."

"He tripped gracefully," Yeonjun says, and though Soobin has his back to him, he knows he’s waving his hand like the whole thing isn’t a big deal. "Anyway we're talking about you right now."

Soobin finally turns to him and groans. He makes a show of slouching his shoulders and letting his arms hang loose at his sides as he whines, "This dance is killing me, hyung."

"I can tell."

"Is it that obvious?" 

"No," Yeonjun says, and a smirk plays on his face. "No, it's just that you filled your water bottle up with hot water."

Soobin comes back to his senses enough to feel the warmth of the bottle on his fingertips. He looks down to find steam rising from it, the water rippling as his hands shake. He could've dropped it upon the realization, but at the very least he has enough control over his limbs to not do that.

"Soobin-ah," Yeonjun says, taking the bottle from him. "Let's sit down."

"Huh?" He looks back up. "We can't. We have the music video shoot in—"

"Three weeks. Let's sit down for five minutes," Yeonjun repeats, and Soobin clears his throat and nods. It's as though his legs were waiting for permission to collapse from underneath him, and he can only walk a few steps before sliding his back down the wall.

His eyes flutter shut as he finally catches his breath, and he focuses all the energy he has left on the sound of Yeonjun emptying the hot water and refilling his bottle with something better. It makes his heart pick up again. He grabs his chest and wills it to stop, or at least to make some sense.

"Here." Yeonjun is sitting beside him now, holding his bottle out to him. Soobin takes it, needing a drink before he can even say thank you, and instead shows his gratitude with a huge gulp. 

Yeonjun sat close, close enough that their legs are pressed together and his arm brushes against Soobin’s as he takes a swig from his own water bottle. Soobin’s skin grows hot where their bodies meet, but he does his best to ignore it. 

"Look at you," Soobin lifts his chin. "You're barely even sweating."

"You sweat enough for the whole team," Yeonjun laughs. He reaches his hand out to ruffle Soobin's damp hair, and his thumb brushes against Soobin's forehead. Without meaning to, Soobin feels himself lean into it, and it’s at that very moment that Yeonjun pulls his hand away. 

This touchiness is nothing new. Yeonjun is always finding new ways to tease Soobin: ruffling his hair, pinching his cheeks, and even pretending to go in for a kiss just to watch him recoil. But lately there’s something different about it that makes Soobin’s entire being light up. 

"Anyway, you'll get it," Yeonjun says. "You always do."

"I had it and then I lost it, for some reason."

"It happens. You'll get it. You’re a great dancer, Soobin-ah. You know that."

Soobin lies his head back against the wall, too tired to fight Yeonjun on it, and together they listen to the rest of their team chattering behind the doors. Beomgyu is screaming about something, his shoes squeaking against the floor, and Soobin can hear Hueningkai and Taehyun laughing in sync at whatever Beomgyu is doing. 

The kids are preoccupied now, but he and Yeonjun only have a few minutes left before they come out and wonder what’s taking them so long. 

His eyes trail up from his feet, past Yeonjun’s sweatpants and to his forearm. His gaze stops there, on the purple and green bruise the size of a baseball right in the middle. 

“You train too hard,” he mumbles.

Yeonjun glances down and shrugs. “I’ve done worse.”

“Hmm,” Soobin hums, his eyes still heavy with exhaustion, and he reaches his hand out. 

Yeonjun sits up. “Well don’t tou--” 

He stops himself short the moment Soobin’s fingertips touch his skin. Soobin doesn’t prod at the bruise with a laugh like either of them would have expected. Just runs his fingers over it with his mouth set into a pout.

Soobin’s heart is in his throat and he keeps messing up _Crown_ and he just had to look for an excuse to keep touching Yeonjun and he doesn’t know why any of that is.

“Soo--” Yeonjun clears his throat. “Soobin-ah.” 

Soobin comes out of his reverie and lifts his head. He flattens his hand against Yeonjun’s bruise for just a moment before Yeonjun’s own hands cup his face. In all of a second, Yeonjun is leaning in, pressing his lips to his, and Soobin’s arms are flying up in defense. 

He just barely relaxes into it. His eyes have only just closed and his palms open slowly, his arms lowering their shield. And then the touch is gone again, just like that.

He doesn’t get the chance to register it, to understand the implications of it, before it’s over. He keeps his eyes closed and tries to catch up, his mind reeling.

Yeonjun should be smacking his arm any second. He waits for him to ask why he didn’t flinch away like usual, to tell him that it was just a joke and he didn’t mean to fall into him like that. 

But none of that comes. In fact, when Soobin finally opens his eyes, Yeonjun is no longer beside him. The door to the practice room is falling shut and he’s nowhere to be found.

Soobin blinks. It all happened so suddenly that he must have dreamt it. Just pulled the feeling from thin air while Yeonjun was filling his own water bottle. But why?

It came out of nowhere, and now heat is uncontrollably rising to his cheeks. He scrubs them with the heels of his palms and lets out a groan that sounds more like a whimper. 

Everything is happening too fast. It wasn’t even that long ago that Soobin didn’t know Yeonjun at all.

[THEN]

Soobin stared down the long hallway as he left Bang PD-nim’s office, his brand new building keycard and dorm key clutched to his chest. The BigHit building was a puzzle, and in his nervous haze he missed the producer’s directions to the dorm. 

“Fourth floor,” Soobin heard from behind him, and he turned back around to see Bang PD-nim grinning. “There’s signs on the wall to guide you once you get up there. The room number is on the keychain.”

“Thank you,” Soobin said breathlessly, bowing and turning back around on his heel so fast he nearly tripped. 

Not exactly the greatest first impression ever. Or, well -- third impression. But the other two weren’t great either, and at this point he was just reinforcing how anxious and forgetful he was. 

In the elevator, he hiked his duffel bag up on his shoulder and let out a heavy sigh. He was instructed to bring only one bag of essentials since he’d be sharing the dorm with several other trainees, but even that weighed him down. 

Soobin wasn’t sure if he belonged here. There was too much working against him already.

First, he screwed up his audition. Then, after making it right with a video audition, BigHit couldn’t get ahold of him because he wrote the wrong phone number down. It took them two months to track him down, almost three.

The elevator doors dinged and slid open to the fourth floor. Soobin took in a deep breath and tried to let out those very thoughts with it.

_You belong there,_ his older sister’s voice rang in his head. _They wouldn’t have asked you to be a trainee after all that if they didn’t see potential in you._

He forced a smile on his face and stepped out. If they actually saw potential, he just had to work really hard and prove them right. He was going to be the best trainee they ever had. 

  
The first thing Soobin heard when he unlocked the door to the dorm was, “Isn’t that Yeonjun’s?” 

He stood in the entryway and tried to keep his smile on his face, no matter how nervous. But the smile quickly fell when no one even looked his way. 

“Oh, it just said ‘Yeo,’ so I thought it was yours,” a boy who looked startlingly similar to Jimin-sunbaenim said from the kitchenette. A spoonful of tteokbokki was just centimeters from his mouth. 

His friend shoved him playfully, and everything in the spoon splattered on the ground. 

“Well, now it’s nobody’s,” he laughed.

“Where is Yeonjun, anyway?” Another boy said from his spot on the couch. 

Soobin scanned the room while they talked. There was the two boys in the kitchen, the boy on the couch, and another doing crunches on the rug below it. Plus one probably in the shower judging by the sound of the water running. That was five, and for a second Soobin thought he might actually get a bunk. But then he remembered the topic of conversation.

“Practice room,” Jimin look-alike said through a mouthful of tteokbokki he finally got to take. 

The guy on the couch rolled his eyes. “He’s practicing? On eval day? It’s not like he’s not going to be number one in every fucking thing again.” 

“You’re just mad you were at the bottom again last time.”

“Like hell I--” 

All Soobin did was put his bag down. It was barely a thud against the tile floor, but suddenly the conversation was over and everyone was looking at him.

“Oh shit,” Jimin look-alike said. He put his bowl down on the counter and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He took a few steps toward Soobin and held his hand out. “What a piss-poor introduction, I’m sorry. I’m Wooyoung.” 

Tentatively, Soobin shook his hand, and they both bowed. “I’m Soobin. I just got here,” he said, and then he squeezed his eyes shut and let out an airy laugh. “But you knew that. Obviously.” 

“Hey, I wouldn’t put it past any of us to not notice a new kid for a few days.”

His friend, who was in the middle of cleaning up the spilt tteokbokki, popped his head up. “I would notice.”

“Yeah, but you’d notice and then proceed not to tell anyone,” Wooyoung turned to him to say, and his friend muttered “true,” under his breath. Back at Soobin, he said, “That’s Yeosang.” 

Yeosang was back to wiping the floor, and he lifted his hand above the counter to give a little wave. Although he couldn’t see him, Soobin waved back. 

Wooyoung paused and glanced at the other two boys. After a beat of silence, he sighed. “You guys suck at introductions.” 

The boy doing crunches sat up. “He’ll catch on eventually,” he said, and Wooyoung rolled his eyes. “So, are we going to ask him, or what?” 

“Oh, um,” Soobin took a half-step back. “Ask me what?” 

“It’s just this stupid tradition,” Yeosang said. He was leaning against the counter now, picking at Wooyoung’s discarded tteokbokki with chopsticks. 

“We can’t ask him until he meets all of us,” Wooyoung said.

“But we all have more of a chance if Yeonjun’s _not_ here.”

“Wh-what’s the question?” Soobin asked, but Yeosang had taken the food and was on his way to the bedroom, and no one else seemed to hear him. 

“You wouldn’t get chosen even if we asked him now,” Wooyoung turned back to Soobin, signaling the end to the conversation. “Anyway, it’s evaluation day today, so we’ll be out of here in a little bit. You’ll have to pick a couch since all of the bunks are taken right now.”

“Ah, I...I figured.”

“But don’t worry,” Wooyoung leaned in to whisper. “Hyunwoo will be leaving any day now.” 

“Dude,” the guy on the couch, apparently named Hyunwoo, sat up. “I’m literally within earshot. You’re so annoying.”

“I could be annoying, or I could be right. Who knows?” Wooyoung said, and Soobin tried to laugh along. He couldn’t tell if they were teasing each other or if there was actual tension. 

He had thought, maybe, all of the trainees would be friends since anyone had the possibility of making the final lineup. It had been his way of quelling his anxiety about meeting everyone, but it still made the most sense. To him, at least.

Before he could even start to figure it out, though, Wooyoung was yelling for Yeosang and stomping into the bedroom.

“You just left it there! I was hungry!” 

Soobin stayed in the doorway for far too long. He felt dangerously out of place, especially once he noticed Hyunwoo sizing him up. He gave him a tight smile in return, but it wasn’t until Hyunwoo and the other boy (whose name Soobin still needed to figure out) got up to get ready that Soobin could finally breathe. 

_I belong here. BigHit saw potential in me._

He picked his bag up and ambled over to the living area. Neither of the couches looked particularly comfortable, but he liked to pretend he had some kind of choice and tried to survey which couch would be best. 

It was hard, though, to think of something so trivial with the beginnings of his trainee experience weighing on his mind.

What were they going to ask him? Was it some sort of hazing ritual, like they did in American movies? Wooyoung and Yeosang seemed nice enough, but there was an underlying competition that made Soobin feel utterly alone in this at the same time. It didn’t seem so far off to think they’d humiliate him as an induction ceremony. 

He threw his bag onto the fluffier looking couch -- the same one Hyunwoo had been on -- and sat down. He let himself fall back, his head hitting the stiff cushion with a thump, and shut his eyes. 

He tried to brace himself for anything that was to come. Yet underneath all of the uncertainties was another that seemed, for some reason, just as pressing.

_Who was Yeonjun?_

Was he about to meet some kind of god, who was far above any average trainee’s level of skill or cool-ness? That’s what the other guys made it seem like. 

He sighed, pulling himself right-side up, and tried to imagine what Yeonjun might look like. All of the trainees including himself were still boys, underdeveloped string beans with baby faces. But Yeonjun, he guessed, probably looked like a proper idol already. Like a slightly younger Seokjin-sunbaenim, with perfectly floppy hair and defined features. 

Even before they met, he couldn’t get Yeonjun out of his head. 

[NOW] 

Soobin’s fingertips graze over his mouth, his lips still burning from the imagined kiss, when Hueningkai pops his head out from the practice room. 

“Soobinie-hyung, are you okay?”

His mind is buzzing so much that he barely hears him. On top of the kiss, Seokjin-sunbaenim walked by a minute ago and gave him a smile and a nod before ducking into the artist’s lounge. He had to have imagined that too. In all of his years in the BigHit building, he never once came across a member of BTS unless it was a planned meeting.

Soobin thinks he might be going crazy. 

He blinks quickly and downs half of what’s left in his water bottle. It could be the stress of everything, or maybe he’s hallucinating because he’s dehydrated.

“Hyung?” 

“I’m fine,” he assures Kai as he pulls himself up. “I just got a bit dizzy and had to sit down.”

Soobin slips around Hueningkai and into the practice room, avoiding his concerned gaze. Yeonjun, Taehyun, and Beomgyu are stretching lazily and talking about the new Zayn album, but Yeonjun looks up as soon as Soobin steps in. Soobin doesn’t dare meet his eyes, either.

Yeonjun knows him too well. He’s afraid the minute his hyung looked him in the eyes, he’d know Soobin just daydreamed about them kissing. He’d never let him hear the end of it. 

“Ooh, hyung! Maybe you’re hungry. I’m starving,” Hueningkai runs up from behind him and grabs his arm. “We should order dumplings, or maybe pizza!”

“Let’s run through _Crown_ a few more times before we order anything.”

He just has to focus on debuting, to push this out of his mind. It was a meaningless fever dream, and he has way more important things to worry about. Like how to stop messing up this choreography.

“Can’t we run through _Cat and Dog_ or something?” Taehyun asks. “We’ve done _Crown_ like 20 times already today. Doing it so much is probably making us mess up more.” 

“Yeah, maybe you need a break from it, Soobinie,” Yeonjun says. Soobin forces himself to look at him, but as soon as their eyes meet, Yeonjun does him a favor and turns his attention to tying his shoes.

“You’re right, and you guys are doing really great,” he says, his voice breaking annoyingly on the final word. “Let’s just, um, run through it once more, okay? And then we can order food and run through _Cat and Dog_ and _Blue Orangeade_ while we wait.” 

It’s an okay compromise, he thinks, considering he wants to do _Crown_ over and over until it’s flawless. Until the counts and movements replace the weird kiss-haze he’s feeling. As soon as the boys give some form of exhausted “okay,” he heads toward the stereo to queue up the song.

“Alright guys, we can get it this time.” Beomgyu says. He slides across the floor and into his starting position, and the other two slowly do the same. “And then I’m thinking...bindaetteok.”

Hueningkai joins them on the floor. “I vote bulgogi and pepper pizza.”

“Bindaetteok sounds good,” Taehyun says, and Hueningkai pouts. He looks from Yeonjun to Soobin, hoping one of them will want pizza too. 

Soobin rushes to take his spot before the song starts. He barely hears the debate at all; he’s too intently focused on getting the steps right to think about food, or eating in general. When the morse code starts through the speakers, they all go silent. 

And he does get the steps right -- at least at first -- despite feeling Yeonjun’s presence behind him, to his left, to his right. His lips still tingle, but he’s focused more on his feet.

Then Yeonjun takes his hand. Taehyun does too; it’s part of the choreo and always has been. Yet Yeonjun’s is the only one he really notices, and a warmth spreads through Soobin’s body. 

This is where he always starts to mess up. His brain practically short circuits and stops communicating with his arms and feet. He still moves thanks to muscle memory, but his movements are nowhere near as fluid as the others’. 

His stomach flips when he and Yeonjun pull each other up, backs against each other. And then Yeonjun’s right up beside him and takes his hand again. 

Yeonjun, Yeonjun, Yeonjun. That’s all his brain becomes. No wonder he starts stumbling and falling by the time he has to get on Yeonjun and Beomgyu’s backs. 

It’s Yeonjun, he’s figured out now, that’s making him mess up run-through after run-through. He feels...something. Something that makes no sense. Something that made him daydream about Yeonjun’s lips upon his. 

_So maybe it isn’t something I can ignore._

Well, he’s going to have to try his damned hardest anyway. 

**Author's Note:**

> Let's be friends!  
> TWITTER:[@thesoftsoobin](http://www.twitter.com/thesoftsoobin)  
> 


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